The Person To Whom I Am Related By Marriage accuses me of having her doppleganger hidden away somewhere.
“One wife at a time” has always been my motto, but when her suspicion is supported by the written word it’s difficult to talk your way out of it. She even knows her rival’s name: Mrs. 38808 Dowd.
That’s the way the offering from a local home furnishings store was addressed. And we know such solicitations from mass mailing lists are never wrong. Right? So, somewhere there must be a 38808 Dowd, who I call Triple 8 because there’s a three and there are three 8s and… well, you get my drift.
This isn’t the first time our household has been assumed to harbor people we don’t know. A few years ago, some fumble-fingered data entry person mistyped my first name on a mailing list used by Macy’s department store. He or she added an “s” to the William and dropped my middle initial, thus creating my first clone — Williams Dowd, an entirely new entity on Planet Earth. Ever since that fateful day, his junk mail has been arriving at my house with maddening regularity.
Eventually, perhaps through diligent work in the laboratories cross-indexing mailing lists, my true middle initial was added to another new being’s name, thus creating Clone No. 2, a fellow named Williams M. Dowd. His mail shows up a lot, too. The Bank of New York, in its zeal to create new customers, sent its latest offer to my home addressed to what appears to be Clone No. 3, a newcomer named Williams M. Dowd Jr.
There are 34 Dowd households with listed numbers in the local telephone book. I’m one of only two people named William. The other one has no middle initial or suffix, so he appears to be a legitimate entry. Therefore, I must assume all my true clones have unlisted numbers.
I wonder if they live in the same world I inhabit, a place that will be emerging from the latest rainy spell tomorrow. Or maybe they always have 24-hour sunshine, lollipop trees and Coca-Cola fountains. You never know.
(Posted 07/20/07)
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